@zdl@mastodon.online @kyozou@sfba.social I don't know, given his background I find it equally hard to believe that he was completely oblivious to the ambiguity of the name 小红书 to a bilingual Chinese-English audience. I mean, he's a Chinese man called Mao who studied and worked in the West for years. Imagine how many times he must have heard the same lazy jokes about his name over and over again.
On the other hand, the Cultural Revolution period is unique in recent Chinese history, in that the Chinese government does allow relatively critical discourse about it. Take this notebook I bought 10 years ago in a pretty mainstream souvenir shop near 后海. It strikes me that the subject isn't totally off-limits for gentle mockery. So it doesn't seem inconceivable to me that Mao calculated he could get away with it as long as he maintained a degree of plausible deniability.